Slap at Conservatism is Itself Too "Easy"

To paraphrase Michael K. Mayo's recent editorial: it must be pretty easy to be a liberal. I should know; I used to be one. My transformation, however, came somewhat later than Mr. Mayo's. I grew up as a Democrat in the middle of Republican Kansas. I argued against the death penalty, vociferously condemned U.S. policy in Central America, and flirted with socialism as an answer to American domestic problems. My school lockers sported in turn a Mondale/Ferraro and a Dukakis/Bentsen sticker. At the time when Mr. Mayo was adulating him, Ronald Reagan was for me the incarnate manifestation of pure evil.

But after several months immersed in the production of Harvard's student press, I became disillusioned with the rhetoric and philosophy of contemporary liberalism.

The world is more complicated than the Manichean division of oppressor and oppressed upon which so much liberal polemic is based, and life consists in more than the abundance or equality of material and political possessions which seems to be the summum bonum of most modern liberal thought.

To a conservative, economic considerations such as private property and the market are instrumental means toward some moral end: These things are preconditions for the kind of action which makes the moral life possible. For the liberal, redistribution and socialization have become ends in themselves, and there is no problem which will not admit a material and governmental solution. Nothing better demonstrates the hollow materialism of the liberal agenda than its callow indifference to family and to the moral environment in which children are brought up and educated, so long as public monies are available to exacerbate the problem.

"Mother Teresa does more for the world in one hour," writes Mr. Mayo, "than Nixon, Reagan, and Bush did all their lives." I will admit the strong probability of the statement, and go farther. Mother Teresa does more for the poor in one hour than Johnson, Carter, and Clinton, with all their programs and initiatives, have done in all their careers. Humane commitment and deep compassion cannot be replaced by a faceless government bureaucracy whose primary effect has been to create a permanent underclass dependent upon the state.

Mr. Mayo describes Mother Teresa as "someone who has given her life to helping people systematically oppressed by an unjust economic and political system." I strongly doubt that Mother Teresa sees her efforts in quite those terms. The moral and religious commitments which underlie her work--commitments which oblige her to oppose abortion and contraception no less than to show charity to the poor--are not, it seems, those of the majority of American liberals.

I will leave to the current staff of Peninsula the further defense of their choices for "Women of the Year." But Mr. Mayo's incredulity about Mother Teresa's selection is telling.

It must remain a paradox largely incomprehensible to these liberals that much of the strongest conservative support comes not from the very wealthy but from the working classes. The vast majority of conservatives here at Harvard are from extremely modest, working-class backgrounds. My own academically-employed family is the exception rather than the rule. But true conservatives recognize that there are values whose conservation is more important than the conservation of wealth and principles the universal extension of which is more important than equality of income.

On this campus, commitment to the pantheon of liberal causes may be the best means of expurgating the accumulated bourgeois guilt of a life led in suburbia and private high school.

It is easy to ignore, for the time being, the deforming effects that the application of liberal principles have upon individual and social life, and especially upon the people whom the liberals claim to be most interested in helping. To salve one's own conscience at the expense of decency and the welfare of another is comforting, to be sure, but it can scarcely be considered courageous. Christopher B. Brown '94   President, Harvard Conservative Club